Programmatic media buying is famous for its specific terminology. In order to help you get fluent with all its terms and acronyms, we decided to create a new series of blog articles called “The Programmatic Advertising Dictionary”. Each article will give you the simple answers to all your questions.

Here are the first 3 terms in our Dictionary:

Impression - a digital ad that has been called from its source and loaded on a webpage. You might see some definitions that include “when a digital ad has been loaded on a webpage and seen by the user” but that is not entirely correct. There are cases when an ad is published but it was still not noticed by the user. Ad viewability deals with this type of situations and aims to give the answer to the question: Was my impression really seen? You can read more about it here.

Click - just as you might suggest, a “click” is when someone clicks on a digital ad. Clicks are one of the most important metrics in digital advertising because they can help you measure your engagement with your audiences and determine what kind of ad provokes their interest. For this reason making sure that the click was done by a human, and not by a fraudulent bot is essential. In the programmatic advertising ecosystem there are number of dedicated tech providers that develop advanced solutions for ad verification, and every player in the buying process (e.g. Demand-Side Platforms, Ad Exchanges, etc.) has its own procedure to tackle the bots issue.

Conversion - a conversion is when a click on your ad leads to a specific type of action. This could be - a sign-up, a download of a research, a page view or a purchase. You decide which actions should be counted as conversions.